The Pink Ghetto Read online

  Something must have really driven her over the edge… That phrase made my blood freeze.

  “I never thought she looked depressed, did you?” Lindsay asked.

  Maybe I managed to shake my head, but suddenly I had trouble moving at all. A horrible certainty had taken hold of my brain. That awful book! The Rancher and the Lady. Could it have been Muriel’s?

  Why had I not guessed?

  I remembered sitting at my computer, pounding out a rejection letter that was probably the most callous thing I had ever sent to an author, ever. I might as well have scrawled Loser, get out of my way on one of my business cards and mailed it off. Every single word of that letter had probably seemed like a poison dart to Muriel.

  I slipped down in my chair until I was slumped over in a perfect C-curve. Everything else—all my worries, angers, resentments—fell away from me and left me feeling nothing but pure guilt. I imagined Muriel sitting at that reception desk for nine hours every day, then going home to her parents’ house—how dismal was that?—to write The Rancher and the Lady. How long had it taken her. Months? Years?

  And then she had picked me, personally, to read her work. And what had I done? Nothing. I’d just left her hanging. Agonizing. And then finally, brutally, I’d sent her a one-paragraph rejection.

  Lindsay squinted at me. “Are you okay? You look pale.”

  “What hospital is she at?”

  She shrugged. “Somewhere in the Bronx, I think. Human resources was going to arrange to send her flowers, so you don’t have to worry about that. They’ll be sending around a card for everyone to sign this afternoon.”

  A card. Wouldn’t that be great? And wouldn’t Muriel just love reading it? Especially when she got to my name—the name of her assassin.

  My guilty conscience propelled me out of my chair and out the door.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Lindsay yelled after my retreating back.

  “The Bronx!”

  Getting information was much easier than I had feared it would be. Once I told human resources I wanted to visit Muriel, they assumed that I must be one of her best friends at the office. Why else would I put myself out for a mere coworker?

  I played along and got the name of the hospital from them—St. Felicity’s—then I headed for the elevator. On the way, Mercedes flagged me down. “Don’t forget that book,” she said.

  I walked backwards a few steps so I wouldn’t have to stop. “It’s on my desk—I’ll get it to you ASAP.”

  “Excellent!” she chimed.

  I had no idea where I was going. The Bronx? It was just the great unknown at the top of the transit map, as mysterious to me as the vast arctic whiteness at the top of a globe. I had never been to a Yankees game, or to the zoo. None of Sylvie’s foodstuffs had required me to go farther north than Harlem, so there my travels had stopped. I had to ask a station booth attendant for directions, and then, because I never trust station booth attendants, I made her repeat them to me twice, which caused the line of people hurrying places on their lunch hours behind me to start grumbling in a way that sounded angry and moblike.

  New York City is no place for the directionally clueless.

  On the train, I hung glumly onto a strap even though there were miles of empty seats around me. Standing made me feel more like a penitent. I had no idea why I was going to see Muriel, or what I would say to her when I got there. I couldn’t take back a book rejection. I guess I just wanted to let her know that I wasn’t heartless. I wanted to start doing things right for once.

  That booth clerk must have known what she was talking about, because St. Felicity’s was only a block away from the 210th Street station. I stopped at the gift shop next to the hospital cafeteria and charged the largest bouquet they had that wasn’t a funeral spray.

  Then I found her room and crept quietly through the door.

  Muriel looked up. I don’t know what I thought she was going to look like. I knew she wasn’t going to be in a padded cell. I guess I expected her to seem more depressed—maybe laid out in bed and hooked up to an IV drip of Valium. Instead, she was sitting in a chair by the window, reading a Candlelight romance. It was Renegade Lover, by Missy Martin, one of my authors. That detail made my heart sink even further.

  She had on a flannel nightgown decorated with stripes of cabbage roses; over it was draped one of those crocheted bedjackets that at some point in the history of fashion normal women had actually worn. It was as anachronistic now as a bustle, but it made perfect sense that Muriel would not only have one but actually use it.

  Her hair was pulled back neatly, and when she looked up, she even had her customary stripe of blue eye shadow in place. In the middle of a nervous breakdown, the woman refused to be untidy.

  Her face lit up when she saw me. “Rebecca! What a surprise!”

  I seeped all the way into the room. “Hey, Muriel,” I said. “Hope you don’t mind a visit.”

  “Oh, no. I am so pleased to see you here.”

  She was? Belatedly, it occurred to me that if I were confined to a psych ward in the Bronx, the last thing I would be craving was a visit from a coworker.

  “What beautiful flowers!” she exclaimed.

  I handed them to her, then sank onto the bed. “Thought they might brighten up your room a little bit.” She already had a bouquet of roses on her windowsill.

  “They are lovely. Call me a girl of simple tastes, but I have always had a weakness for the humble chrysanthemum.”

  I smiled. In fact, I felt like my smile was frozen onto my face.

  She looked at me, and for a moment a little of her normally brittle façade fell away. “I guess the story of my little incident last weekend has made the rounds at the office.”

  “Only to a very few people,” I lied.

  I encircled my hand around the metal side of the bed—the one that could be lifted on both sides to provide a cagelike barrier for the patient. All hospital beds had them, but somehow seeing one on a bed in a psych ward seemed more sinister.

  “I think the doctors are going to let me go tomorrow,” Muriel continued, “and if all goes well, I hope to return to work the first of next week.”

  “So soon?”

  “I miss it,” she said. “And since they can’t find anything wrong with my heart, there’s no reason to keep me here.”

  I leaned forward a little. “Your heart?”

  “Didn’t you hear? That’s what was wrong with me—they thought I was having a little heart attack, because I accidentally took a few sleeping pills. But it turns out I am fine. Just one of those things.”

  Okay. I know Lindsay isn’t the most reliable person in the world, but there was no way even Lindsay could have mistaken “little heart attack” for “suicide attempt.” And I knew I wasn’t in The Twilight Zone. I was in the Bronx, in a psych ward. I wasn’t mistaken about these facts.

  And yet there was Muriel, very calm in her little bed jacket, telling me that it had all just been a big mix-up.

  Naturally. She was crazy.

  I cleared my throat and for once in my life attempted to choose my words very carefully. “Are you sure you shouldn’t take some more time off, just to be sure you’re…yourself again?”

  “I’ve never felt more myself,” she replied.

  And now that I considered her words, they seemed true. She looked just like Muriel always looked. Which, now that I gave the matter some thought, could be summed up in one word: Nuts.

  It was unnerving. I had come up here wanting to atone for my thoughtlessness, wanting to apologize. But how do you apologize to someone in such complete denial?

  “How’s your friend?” I asked.

  “Which one?” Her eyes narrowed on me with a jarring sharpness. “I have more than one, you know.”

  I flinched. I hadn’t meant to insult her. “The writer.”

  “Melissa MacIntosh,” she reminded me with a hint of scolding in her tongue. “I’m surprised you don’t remember. It’s only been a week since you
rejected her book.”

  I winced, but this was sort of what I’d come for, so I didn’t mind. “I have a bad memory for names.”

  “You held onto that book for months. After all that time, I would think you’d have memorized the author’s name, at least.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Well!” Muriel said with quiet indignation. “You don’t have to apologize to me.”

  But that was the thing. I did have to apologize to her. It suddenly seemed absolutely essential to my future well-being that I apologize to Muriel-Melissa. Unfortunately, Muriel wasn’t giving any quarter, forgiveness wise. She obviously didn’t want to admit, even at this late date, that she was Melissa MacIntosh. How did you apologize to a loopy woman who wouldn’t cop to writing the book you rejected?

  “Did you read my letter?” I asked her.

  “Melissa showed it to me.”

  Uh-huh. I wondered if she was a clinical split personality, like Sally Field in Sybil. I was determined to talk to her about this until she had a breakthrough. (In psychiatric poker terms, I would take her Sally Field and raise her one Judd Hirsch from Ordinary People.)

  “What did you think of the letter?”

  She plucked at the pearl button of her bedjacket for a moment, as if considering carefully how to answer. “It was very blunt,” she said finally.

  There. Let her criticize me. “I should have taken more care,” I agreed.

  “The tone was harsh,” she added.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I typed some of Mary Jo’s letters once when her assistant had appendicitis, and Mary Jo was never that harsh.”

  Less kind than Mary Jo. Ouch. I did feel chastised. It felt good, actually. “I’m so sorry.”

  Her lips twisted. “You don’t have to keep apologizing to me, Rebecca. It’s Melissa who got the letter.”

  “Melissa. Right.”

  “You asked for my opinion on what I thought about the letter, and I am giving it to you.”

  “I know.” I thought for a moment. “It’s just that I’ve considered that letter since I wrote it, and I’ve felt remorse. Sometimes you wish you could take things back, you know?”

  “Well, it is a little too late for that. Melissa read the letter and she was upset.”

  I shifted, and decided to change tactics. “If I knew Melissa personally, you know what I would do?”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to sit down with her and, first, say that the letter was written too hastily. It didn’t give her any of the encouragement she deserves. Do you know what an accomplishment it is to finish a book?”

  Muriel looked skeptical. “Even a lousy one?”

  “It wasn’t lousy. It was just a little amateurish. The plot felt tired. But with a better hook, a well-developed story, and some interesting characters…”

  She tilted her head. “You didn’t like the characters, even?”

  My mouth clamped shut. Damn. I swallowed. “No, I did. They were the best part. But…you know…if you put Scarlett and Rhett in The Pokey Little Puppy, it’s still The Pokey Little Puppy.”

  She frowned at me, and I couldn’t blame her. Suddenly, I was back at the Portland conference trying to explain how to write a book. I was starting to sweat like I had in Portland, too. “What I mean is, I wish I could sit down with Melissa, have a cup of coffee, and tell her all the things I liked about The Rancher and the Lady. I’d like to give her some encouragement, which I probably didn’t convey in the letter. I’d hash out some possible ideas for future projects.”

  She brightened. “Would you really?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, you know, it could be arranged for you to meet with Melissa.”

  Yeah, I’ll bet.

  We sat for a little while longer, trying to keep the conversational balloon up in the air by talking about the weather, but after five minutes it was clear that it was time for me to go. I stood up.

  “Thank you for visiting, Rebecca.” She looked hesitant, then blurted out, “And did you really mean what you said about talking to Melissa?”

  “Of course!”

  I made what seemed like an overly-pat hospital exit speech. I told her that she would feel better soon.

  “I am better,” she insisted. “I’m perfectly fine.”

  I was in a gloomy mood when I shuffled toward the exit of that hospital. How depressing to see the layers of denial and artifice that had been holding Muriel together suddenly peeled away. I wasn’t sure that visit had helped her or me.

  I was no Judd Hirsch.

  Just before I hit the doors to the outside, I heard someone call my name.

  I turned, wondering who else I knew in the Bronx. But the person I laid eyes on was the last person on earth I would have expected to see again.

  It was Bernadine, Sylvie’s old pal. Seeing her in such a weird spot, and feeling so forlorn as I did, I practically fell on her neck as one would a long lost friend.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I have to get my cholesterol tested,” she said. “I have cholesterol. And diabetes.”

  I murmured in sympathy. I was afraid to ask the question foremost in my mind; Sylvie, I was certain, was probably not doing well. If she was doing at all. Her accountant had made it sound like she was on death’s door, and that had been months ago.

  But, finally, I had to ask, “Do you still see Sylvie?”

  Bernadine grunted. “See her! Of course I see her. We play canasta every Tuesday at her place.”

  “Her place? Did she go home?”

  Bernadine waved her hand. “Nah, she’s in an assisted living community on Elmhurst Avenue in Queens. A prison, she calls it. An old folks home.”

  I frowned. “Why doesn’t she go back to her apartment?”

  “Because of that crook!”

  “Mr. Langley?”

  Bernadine practically spat. “That’s the one.” She narrowed her eyes on me. “But of course you wouldn’t care about that. Sylvie says you abandoned her.”

  “I was fired.”

  Bernadine’s mouth was pulled down, as if that was no excuse.

  It wasn’t, I realized. I had been with Sylvie for two and a half years, and for the past four months, I had barely spared her a thought. I had forgotten her.

  “The accountant wouldn’t even tell me where she was,” I said. “He kept going on about the estate’s executors.”

  “Ha! That’s him. Now he has all her money, and Sylvie’s living in a cage.” She shrugged. “It’s actually an okay place, but she calls it a cage. She misses her home.”

  “Of course.” I frowned. So my instincts about R.J. Langley had been correct. “How did she get involved with Langley?”

  “He’s a relation,” Bernadine said. “Poor Sylvie!”

  Guilt tugged at me. “I’d like to see her.”

  “That would be nice. Like she always tells me, inmates appreciate visitors.”

  I got the address from Bernadine, then I took a circuitous route back to the office, looping through Harlem to get Sylvie some hot pickled okra. I would take it to her this weekend.

  By the time I straggled back to my desk, it was almost four. I felt drained. I flopped down in my chair, feeling spent. I couldn’t remember now where I’d left off. I tried to think back on what I had been working on when I ran off to the hospital. That seemed ages ago now.

  Something about my desk bothered me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

  Then I remembered, and I let out a groan. Fleishman! That damn book of his. I had been writing a rejection letter.

  I searched the top of my desk, but I didn’t see the book. I swiveled toward my bookshelf; it wasn’t there, either. I started tearing my office apart, looking for it. When I came up empty, I got up and went to Lindsay’s desk.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asked. “Did you go see Muriel?”

  I nodded.

  She looked eager for news. “How was she?”
r />   For a moment I was torn between the urge to tell someone just how incredibly nuts Muriel was and to protect her. In the end, sympathy won out. I wasn’t rock solid, myself. “It was all an accident.” I fabricated a story involving a big pill-bottle mix-up, knowing it would circulate around the building in nothing flat.

  “Wow!” she said. “That’s really awful. And here we’ve spent the whole day thinking she was crazy!”

  It was as good a time as any to change the subject. “Did you take a book from my desk today?”

  Her eyes flew open. “I didn’t go near your office, I swear!” she said defensively. “Except once to grab a peppermint from the jar on your bookshelf, but that’s all I touched, I swear. Oh, and I maybe swiped a few of your Post-it notes from your top drawer. But you had a whole package.”

  “Never mind,” I said.

  A niggling oddball idea scratched at the back of my mind, but just to make sure it couldn’t be true I went over to Lisa’s desk.

  “There you are!” she exclaimed. “Finally!”

  “Is Mercedes here?”

  “She went home early.”

  I frowned. “Did she try to find me?”

  Lisa snorted. “Uh, yeah? Like, all afternoon?”

  “Oh. I had to leave for a while…”

  “Well never mind,” Lisa said. “She just got it off your desk.”

  “What?” But of course I knew what. It was just as I feared.

  “The book.”

  My heart sank. “Cutting Loose?”

  “I don’t know what the hell it was called,” Lisa said. “All I know is that for about an hour she was locked up in her office with the thing.”

  “What’d she think?”

  “I dunno.”

  Maybe she hadn’t liked it. In fact, there was a really good chance she hadn’t. It was a weird book; not right for Candlelight at all.

  “But I think she took it home with her,” Lisa said, “if that makes you feel any better.”

  It didn’t.

  Chapter 16

  I practiced my speech to Fleishman on my way home. Not aloud, of course. Not that anyone on the J train would have noticed an office worker babbling to herself, but I still take pride in maintaining the appearance of sanity.